Page:The Red Man and the White Man in North America.djvu/219

Rh for warfare, were those which the Dutch on the Hudson, about the year 1613 and subsequently, bartered with the Iroquois or the Mohawks for peltry. This was most grievously complained of afterwards by the French in Canada and the English on the Atlantic seaboard as an act of real treachery, for the sake of gain, against the common security of all European colonists. The French and the English protested against it, and vainly sought by prohibitions and enactments to prevent any further traffic of the sort. The mischief was done. The savage now felt himself to be on an equality with the white man, of whose artificial thunder and lightning he no longer stood in superstitious awe. Not again were the savages to quail before the report and the deadly missile, as they did on that first campaign of the French, when Champlain, near the lake to which he gave his name, fired his arquebuse with fatal effect. The Indian's eye and aim with the rifle have heightened his skill and prowess as a fighter. As we shall note further on, upon the plea that as game has become scarcer and more timid the bow and arrow have lost their use, the Indians on the reservations and under treaty and pensions with our Government, some of whom are of worse than dubious loyalty, have been freely supplied with the best revolvers, rifles, and fixed metallic ammunition. Fierce have been the protests from our soldiers and frontiersmen, that the instruments of their annoyance and destruction come from our national armories.

There has always been a general tendency among the Europeans here to overestimate the presence, method, and influence of anything to be properly called government in the internal administration of Indian tribes. The nearest approach to what we regard as organization, representation and joint fellowship among the Indians is presented to us in what is known as “The Iroquois League,” which has had an imaginative delineation in the exquisite poem of